Thus he planned, and content with his plan he opened his eyes again. At once he was made uneasy. He met the eyes of a small, white-haired man with a deeply lined, brown face who was watching him fixedly from the benches opposite. This was Albert Coulter, a man of many expeditions in untravelled countries, when there were countries still untravelled, whose name had become a signal for dark whispers. A callous selfishness, when selfishness might mean the life or health of his companions, and a relentless severity with his natives, was rightly or wrongly imputed. The survivors of his expeditions came back with queer stories. But he had never failed until the moment, when at the age of fifty and with the looks of seventy, he had entered the House of Commons. There, an interesting yet ineffective figure, he sat day after day, solitary, disliked, with brooding eyes under a bristle of gray eyebrows which seemed to be haunted with sinister memories of deep tropical forests and days long past. His eyes rested upon Harry Rames now, not enviously, not encouragingly, but without expression, almost indeed like the eyes of a dead man. Their fixed gaze chilled the blood of Harry Rames and all his satisfaction was marred. He had to move from his place and beyond the reach of those brooding eyes before he shook the impression off. And even now so distinct was it in his memories that he omitted it altogether and deliberately from the story he told that afternoon to Cynthia Daventry. He related in its place another incident which had happened later in the evening.
"We had a division," he said. "I was walking through the lobby and just at the turnstiles where the clerks tick off our names, I found Henry Smale in front of me. The R's and the S's go through the same turnstile. He turned round as I passed through behind him, and said to me in a low voice, 'You have the ear of the House now. Keep your eye on the treasury bench.' That from Smale, who was dissuading me to enter Parliament, means a good deal."
Harry Rames turned and looked at Cynthia.
"Yes," said Cynthia.
There was a smile upon her face rather wistful, rather ironic.
"So you have turnstiles in your House of Commons," she said slowly.
"No. Did I say turnstiles?" he asked. "There's no actual barrier which revolves. But there's only room for one at a time to pass between the desks. The clerks stand at the desks and register your votes for publication. Otherwise where would party government be?"
"You mean if the votes weren't published men would vote according to their convictions?"
Rames nodded.
"But it's a superficial view," he said. "You have got to take the sum of your policy. As a whole, is it better than the other fellow's? That's what you have to ask yourself when you are going to register a vote upon some particular point which may help to turn your government out and let the other fellows in."
"Yes, I see that," said Cynthia; and once more her eyes fell upon theTimesand she was suddenly conscious of a queer pride. Others to-day were aware of the success which Harry Rames had made; probably she alone was aware of the thought, and the apprehension and the tribulation of soul which had gone to the making of the success. To the others he would just be one of the inevitably successful--what indeed she had herself been wont to think him. To-day, however, he was to her human as he had never been. He had shown himself to her, bleating with fear like an ordinary man at the approach of the fateful moment which was to put him to the test. He had drawn the picture with a sense of humor, but he had not blurred it. Would he have drawn it for any one else, she asked herself? She turned impulsively toward him:
"I wanted you to come to me this week," she said impulsively. "And I thank you very much for telling me not merely that you succeeded, but how near you were to breaking down. But," and she hesitated for a few moments, "I should have been still more grateful if you had come to me the day before you made your speech."
"I almost did," said Harry Rames.
Cynthia smiled, but she did not believe.
"I think," she said, "that this is the very first time you have gone beyond the truth to say a pleasant thing to me."
"It is the truth," he insisted. "I almost did more than come to you. I almost asked you to let me inflict my speech on you before I made it in the House."
"Oh, I wish you had!" cried Cynthia. "It would have made a difference to me this last week--a great difference." Then she turned swiftly toward Harry Rames with a glance of distrust. "Why didn't you come then?" she asked coldly. "There was nothing to hinder you. You knew that you would be very welcome. I should like to have known beforehand what you were going to say;" and once more a gentle wistfulness crept into her voice. "I should have liked also to have heard you in the House. I should have liked, in a word--not to have been shut out."
"You weren't shut out," Harry Rames exclaimed. "You mustn't fancy that! It's not true. If I did not come, it was really because I had you in my thoughts. Yes. I stayed away deliberately because of a saying of Smale's which I know to be true, which I quoted to you at Ludsey."
The distrust grew stronger in Cynthia's mind. What had Smale to do with the matter? Her face hardened. Harry Rames had, till this moment, at all events, been honest, had always stood apart in her eyes by reason of his honesty. Must she strip him now of that quality even as she had to do of the other, the imagined ones?
"What saying?" she asked.
"That many a man may cut a great figure upon the platforms who will never get the ear of the House of Commons. I wanted to be sure that I was not one of those--before I came to you."
A particular significance in the intonation of the words warned her--and then troubled her. She looked at him swiftly, and as swiftly looked away. The blood mounted into her face and flushed her throat.
"I wanted to be sure that I should come not quite empty-handed," he continued.
Cynthia made no pretence to misunderstand him, and no answer. All was explained to her now: why he had stayed away, why he now returned--all those particulars which he had told her she might have guessed, and not one of which had to this moment entered her head. She had never stepped beyond the border-line of friendship in her thoughts of Harry Rames--never once. She was startled now that she was asked to. She needed time to adjust herself to the new point of view. He had been honest with her, after all. That was her first instinctive recollection.
"So I am here now to ask you to marry me," he continued. He spoke very quietly and simply. He did not simulate any passion, and again in her heart comparing him with that other wooer in the Row, she thanked him for his honesty.
Still she made no answer, but calmness had returned to her. She sat looking out of the window, straight ahead of her, with her chin propped in the palm of her hand. She was quite still, and the stillness of her attitude was no greater than the stillness of her mind. There was no throb of joy at her heart. But Harry Rames had been honest with her, and she had been taught not to expect so very much.
"I think you know whom you will be marrying," he resumed. "I have tried to make what I know about myself clear to you as well as to me. You once agreed that I left you no illusions about me."
"Yes. On the platform at the Corn Exchange in Ludsey," Cynthia replied. "I remember quite well. I remember your answer too: That you did not mean to."
"Yes," said Harry Rames. "That was my answer."
Cynthia paused for a few seconds. Then in her turn she began to question him.
"So even then you were thinking that if you succeeded in Parliament--this afternoon would come?"
"Yes."
"Perhaps even before then?"
"Yes, even before then."
Cynthia nodded her head. With a smile in which there was irony and a little of her old resentment, she remarked:
"Yes, you have always looked ahead."
Harry replied simply and gravely:
"Always."
"Thank you," said Cynthia.
She thanked him because he was so perfectly honest with her. He admitted--for his words were no less than such an admission--that he had deliberately thought of her because she had money. On the other hand, it was true that he had stood by and left the opportunity open for any one to snatch until he could himself bring something into the partnership. That weighed with her in his favor.
"Will you tell me when you first began to think of me in this way?" she asked with an earnestness which to Harry Rames appeared quite singular. To his direct mind the one question which needed answering was whether she meant to marry him or no.
"Does the exact date matter?"
"Very much."
Rebellion again broke out in Cynthia. "I believe it is quite a usual question for maidens to ask on these occasions. But no doubt I ought to have asked it with a deeper bashfulness."
Harry reflected. Here was one of the nice subtleties of the feminine mind which somehow he must satisfy.
"It was after I had driven out once or twice from Ludsey to see you. That is as near as I can put it. It was after I had got to know you a little."
"As soon, in a word, as you concluded that I would suit the place." Though the sentence was phrased still in the ironical form, the irony had suddenly gone from her voice. She was so relieved that a smile trembled about her lips. Her next words gave the reason of her relief.
"So really and truly you want me personally--as well."
The question would have sounded vague to a stranger, but these two understood that it was her fortune which she omitted to name. Cynthia knew, as she could not but know, that her wealth had first set his thoughts running toward her. But it was some personal quality which in the end had decided him to ask for her. He must have money--yes, but other help than money as well. It was a satisfaction to her pride that he found it in her.
"Yes," he returned. "A wife can do so much for a man in politics if she is the right wife. I should be very glad if you would marry me," Rames resumed. "I think that we should get along together very well, and together we might do important things."
"Be important things," Cynthia corrected.
Harry Rames smiled.
"That's an old quarrel of ours, Cynthia. I mean 'do' this time."
Cynthia looked at him quickly. She was in the mood to find in that hope the strongest of appeals.
"You really think so?"
"I do. I should owe so very much to you. I should be conscious of my debt. I should try with all my strength to pay it back."
Cynthia gave him her face frankly now. A smile of confidence quite lit it up.
"I have no doubt of that," she said; and then the smile faded, and there came a look of longing.
"But I would rather, of course, that it were work for love of me, than work to repay me. There's a difference, isn't there? But I suppose one can't have everything, and--perhaps--I might be content to help you on."
She fell again to a wistful silence, pursuing the vision of a happiness which might have been down an avenue of bright imagined years. The happiness did exist. She had seen the evidences of it often enough. All men were nottant soit peu cochons, as she had once heard an unhappy French lady describe them, nor were all women neurotic. She had heard of lovers who felt that they had been waiting for one another since the beginning of the world. But it seemed that such happiness was for others, not for her.
"Tell me!" she said. "When you were making your speech, after the agitation had passed and when you were master of yourself, you looked up to the ladies' gallery, you said, and noticed the women behind the grille?"
"Yes."
"Well--it is a little difficult to ask the question--But"--she stopped for a moment or two, and then went on with an appealing timidity, while the color once more mounted into her face--"but I suppose that then--when you knew you were making a success--it never came into your mind that you would have liked to have got me up there in the gallery while you were speaking?"
The temptation to lie was strong upon Harry Rames now. The very timidity of her appeal moved him. It taught him that the truth would hurt her much more than he had ever dreamed. He hesitated. For the first time in her company he was at a loss.
"The truth, please," she pleaded earnestly. "You said that your mind was free, that you could stand outside yourself and look on at what you were doing, as artists do. It never once occurred to you that you wanted me up there in the ladies' gallery, too, at the moment of your success, to witness it--to--yes, to share it with you?"
The word was out at last--the word which she had been striving with her modesty to reach.
"Be frank, please," she prayed.
Harry Rames was at a loss how to wrap the brutal truth up so that it should not hurt overmuch. He had no other intention at this moment. He was for once not considering what effect his answer would have upon his own prospects and future.
"You were in my thoughts," he said. "That's true. For I was thinking that now I could come to you. But, yes, I wanted to be sure of myself first."
"Yes," said Cynthia slowly, and with humility she analyzed the meaning of his words. "You never thought of me as a kind of inspiration to an even greater success in the future if you succeeded now, or as a kind of consolation if you failed. It may be vanity to say so, but I think that is what a woman in whom you were interested, and who was interested in you, would have liked you to have thought. I was, after all, shut out, wasn't I? I was to hear of the achievement after it was done and over, and I was neither to share the preliminary fears, nor feel the revulsion when the triumph came."
"Yes, but look at it from my point of view. There are many who want to marry you--men with something to offer. It wouldn't have been fair if I didn't bring something in my basket too."
"Fair!" cried Cynthia scornfully. "Oh, I know, that's the point of view of the man--at least," and as she realized that she had been unjust, her face dimpled to smiles, "of the men one rather likes." For it occurred to her that Lord Helmsdale would have been troubled by no such scruples.
"No," she said. "You wouldn't have borrowed another man's thoroughbred so that you might cut a dashing figure while you proposed."
Rames had no idea of what she meant, and he behaved as he usually did when unintelligible things were said to him by women. He asked for no explanations and just took no notice of Cynthia's words. He sat quietly at her side and waited.
The clock struck the hour. He put his hand into his pocket, and at the movement Cynthia started.
"There is no hurry," said Harry Rames. "I was only getting out my cigarette case. May I smoke?"
"Of course," replied Cynthia; she was relieved that she need not answer upon the moment. She was still in a great perplexity; and while Harry Rames smoked his cigarette she sought this way and that for a light to guide her. Here was not the marriage of which she had dreamed. No. But he was honest. It was possible, too, that she might be able to help him on, as he had said. And it might be well worth doing. It might be true that the ambitious men are the world's best servants, and not the men possessed with ideas. Ideas, she remembered, with a bitter little smile at her folly, had once given the right of entrance to her enchanted garden. But she had travelled far from its gateway, and the flowers were all dead in it, and its pathways overgrown. It might be that the fixed idea meant the narrow vision. Harry Rames might be right; and if he were, by helping him on, she would make her money of real and great value. It was a gray world anyway--and Harry Rames was honest. She could trust him--though he wounded her.
She turned suddenly toward him.
"Do you remember the supper party at Ludsey?" she asked.
"Of course," he replied: "And the little Frenchman, Monsieur Poizat."
"I was not thinking of him," said Cynthia. A sentence or two spoken at that table by Colonel Challoner had leaped into her memory. Politics meant color in the lives of men. It was the craving for color which fired enthusiasm in the towns of the provinces. Well, she herself craved for bright colors in her life too. Might she not get them out of the paint-pot of politics just as men did?
"If I were to say yes," she remarked, "I would not be content to be merely the witness of your success. I must share the fears which go to make it. I could not sit quiet and twirl my thumbs, shut out from the hopes and apprehensions and endeavors, and just smile admiringly at the result. I must share everything."
"Of course," said Harry Rames. "From the moment you say 'yes,' you share everything. I meant that too when I said that I needed your help."
He spoke gravely and sincerely, and again Cynthia said, "Thank you."
She sat for a little while longer, hesitating upon the brink. To say "yes" would solve the question of a companion. Oh, certainly, there were practical advantages in the acceptance of Harry Rames's proposal. She would have to abandon the hope of beauty in her life. Color, excitement, interest, she might get. But the beautiful life would not be for her. Still, under no circumstances, perhaps, might it have been for her. No one, she reflected, and with some sadness--no one by his approach had ever set her heart beating to a quicker tune. Perhaps there was some defect in her, some want of human passion, she reflected, which placed her in the second rank of women. When Cynthia was humble there was no girl so humble as Cynthia. And, after all, Harry Rames was honest. To that one stable point all her questions brought her back.
She moved at last, and Harry Rames rose and stood before her.
"Well?" he asked.
Cynthia dropped her hands loose at her sides and answered with a smile:
"Why not?"
It was in those words that she accepted him. There was no spirit in them, and very little of expectation. But she had come to expect not very much; and she had travelled a long way from the garden of her dreams.
"After all, there's a turnstile in this affair, too," she said, with a note of bitterness. "A very important one too. For it leads not into a garden, but straight to the treasury bench."
Harry Rames was bewildered. But he made no comment. Women were queer, and it was good to disregard their moments of excitement. Cynthia sprang up the next moment and laid her hand upon his arm.
"Oh, yes, we'll follow Mr. Smale's advice, Harry," she cried, "and we'll keep our eyes on the treasury bench. Why not? Now go, and come back to-morrow."
She was laughing a little wildly, and Harry Rames had the sense to take her at her word. He went out of the room, and Cynthia flung herself down upon the cushions and cried for an hour by the clock.
"Well," she said to herself at the end, as she rose and dried her eyes, "Mr. Benoliel will be satisfied. That's one thing." Almost she seemed to blame Mr. Benoliel for the fact of her engagement.
The odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to come to her, and when he came she told him of her engagement.
"But no one knows of it as yet except yourself," she added; "and no one is to know, for the present. I want it kept a secret."
"Oh!" said Mr. Benoliel, looking at her curiously. "And why?"
"There will be a certain amount of ill-natured talk," Cynthia returned in a confusion. "And I want the time for it to be as short as possible. It will cease after we are married."
"People will say that Rames is an adventurer, who is marrying you for your money," said Mr. Benoliel bluntly, and Cynthia turned on him with spirit.
"Lord Helmsdale's mother will, and other mothers would have said the same of Lord Helmsdale if I had married him."
"So it's to spare the feelings of Harry Rames that you are keeping your engagement secret," said Mr. Benoliel with an ironical wonder. "I should never have suspected him of such delicate susceptibilities."
"Well, I should be uncomfortable too!" cried Cynthia, bending puzzled and indignant brows at him. "I think you are quite horrid."
Benoliel sustained her indignation unabashed.
"Is that the only reason, Cynthia?" he asked.
"You wanted me married," Cynthia continued. "You ought to be very, very pleased."
Mr. Benoliel, however, was not to be lured from his question into a discussion upon the propriety of his feelings. He repeated it.
"Is fear of gossip the only reason, Cynthia, which makes you keep your engagement secret?"
Cynthia again showed signs of confusion. Mr. Benoliel wore his air of omniscience. She sat down upon a chair.
"What do you mean, Mr. Benoliel?"
"This," said he. "I have noticed that the young ladies who keep their engagements secret are not, as a rule, very much in love with the men they are engaged to. They leave themselves a loop-hole of escape."
Cynthia's cheeks flamed. Certainly she had intended to spare Harry Rames and herself some uncomfortable weeks. But would she have minded those weeks had she cared for him? The question came swiftly, and as swiftly was answered. Had she cared for him she would have wanted to wear him like a ribbon on her breast for all the world to see. She realized it with a pang. She would have run quickly forward to meet the gossip and do battle. But she had not run forward. It was true that she had left herself a pathway of retreat, and rather by instinct than from any deliberate plan. Her wariness had prompted her. Once more she had wanted to be safe. But nothing of this was she going to acknowledge to Mr. Benoliel.
"I think you are extraordinarily horrid," she said again with a cold dignity, and hoped that her stateliness would crush her inquisitor.
"When do you propose to marry, then?" he asked.
"Just before Whitsuntide. The House will rise for ten days, I hear, at the least. We shall announce the marriage just before the House rises;" and that indeed was the plan upon which she had agreed only that morning with Harry Rames.
"Then there is no hurry," said Mr. Benoliel. "Perhaps you and Captain Rames will pay me a visit in the country before Whitsuntide comes."
He spoke as though he accepted the situation, and turned to other subjects, fearing to confirm Cynthia in obstinacy by any show of opposition.
"Certainly," she said; "we shall be pleased to come;" and a month later she and Harry Rames came one Friday afternoon to Culver.
The house stood within hearing of the bells of Ludsey, but on that side of the city opposite to the White House. Benoliel had built it himself, and to those who knew the man but slightly it was an astonishing production. Captain Rames, for instance, whose taste was not very meticulous, never ceased to marvel at it. Even this Friday afternoon, as the car swung round a turn of the country road and the thing stood before him, he contemplated it with amazement. It was nothing but a monstrous new villa of red and yellow brick, a pretentious ghastliness of towers and flashing glass rising from the middle of a small bare field within twenty yards of the roadway. An avenue of fir-trees not yet shoulder-high wound to the front door, and there was no need for it to wind. Circular beds of glaring flowers disfigured the new lawns, and little bushes of evergreens, which would one distant day make an effort to be shrubberies, gave to the house a most desolate and suburban look. It seemed wonderful to Harry Rames that so nice and delicate a person as Mr. Benoliel could bear to live in it at all; and still more wonderful that with a dozen of the most beautiful houses in England bosomed in deep meadows and whispered to by immemorial elms, within an easy motor-ride to choose from as his models, he should have devised this unconscionable edifice.
Sir James Burrell, the surgeon, however, who was sitting opposite to Harry Rames in the car, and next to Cynthia, took a different view. He gazed at the house with satisfaction. For it would add yet another subtle paragraph to his character sketch of Mr. Benoliel.
"How extraordinary," he cried, "and yet how like the man! That's just the house which Benoliel would have built. Only one had not the insight to guess it. I love it!" and he leaned his head out of the window and chuckled at the building's grotesqueness. "Yes, I love it. The fitness of things appeals to me." And he turned to the astonished Captain Rames. "You don't see the exquisite appropriateness of that--let us not call it a house--that detached residence to Isaac Benoliel?"
"Well, I don't," said Harry Rames. "He always seemed to me to set up as a lover of beautiful things."
"And the love is genuine," said Sir James, fairly off at a gallop upon his hobby. "He doesn't set up. The love is almost a quality of his race. Yes, but his race doesn't always know what things are beautiful. There's the explanation of that building--race, which confounds logic and is quite untroubled by inconsistencies. There's Benoliel's race in every line of it. He's of the Orient. He loves flamboyancy and gaudiness. He may conceal it carefully from us. But every now and then it must break out, and it has run riot here. Does the East repair and mend? No, it lets its old buildings decay and builds afresh. That's why Mr. Benoliel passes by your stately houses all up for sale in their parks and builds this villa. Remember, Captain Rames, though Mr. Benoliel talks with you and walks with you, he doesn't think with you. Behind those old tired eyes of his, he thinks as the East thinks."
Thus Sir James Burrell, and the car stopped at the front door before he could utter another word. He was not sorry, nor indeed were the other occupants of the carriage. He was merely trying his new paragraph on the dog, so to speak. He needed time to eliminate the unnecessary, and make it vivid with the single word, and fix it up with a nice juxtaposition of paradoxes and altogether to furbish it for presentation.
"He does talk!" said Harry Rames to Cynthia.
"Yes, doesn't he," she replied with a laugh, and then grew serious. "But I wonder whether he's right. I wonder whether Mr. Benoliel thinks and judges from principles which are true to him, but not true to us." Her eyes rested with a strange and thoughtful scrutiny on Harry's face.
"Why should you trouble?" said Harry Rames.
"It makes a little difference to me," said Cynthia. "Perhaps more than a little."
For old Daventry's last words weighed upon her. He had bidden her in troubles and difficulties to seek advice from Isaac Benoliel. He had thought much of his wisdom. She had herself accepted it as a thing beyond question, and a timely help. Now, she began to ask herself, was his wisdom, if it was born of the East and tempered by the instincts of his race, fit for service in her generation and for her people? She pondered the question during the next two days, and leaned more and more to Sir James Burrell's way of thinking from a trivial reason; the inside of Culver agreed so completely with its exterior. Its flamboyancy set the eyes aching. Its wall papers were indigestibly rich with colored flowers, and never was there a blue so vividly blue as the blue of his velvet curtains and triple-pile carpets. It is true that there were treasures of art in Culver, glowing pictures of the early Flemish school, with their crowds of figures, each one a finished miniature, and behind the crowds the clear sky and translucent air; there were marvels of jade, and glorious little statues of silver and marble, but their delicate beauty was spoilt and lost in the riot of gorgeousness which framed them.
One homely place alone there was in that building. The great hall, all colonnades and galleries, occupied the centre of the house. But on each side of the wide chimney, where of an evening, even in the summer, a fire usually burned, a great screen was drawn; and these screens enclosed a space before the fire set about with comfortable chairs, a sofa or two, and little mahogany tables, and made of it a place of comfort. In this space on the Sunday night Cynthia came to grips with Isaac Benoliel, and understood at last his life, and something of his philosophy.
It was eleven o'clock, or a little later. The ladies were retiring for the night. Cynthia herself had her foot upon the lowest step of the stair, and was thinking that after all she was to be spared an argument, when Mr. Benoliel came from the corridor of the smoking-room where he had left the men.
"Will you give me a few minutes, Cynthia?" he asked, and she turned at once and walked to the fire. She stood with a foot upon the rail of the hearth and a hand upon the mantel-shelf, quiet but mutinous. Mr. Benoliel followed her and sat down in a straight-backed arm-chair, facing the fire, and a little way behind her.
"You have not yet announced your engagement, Cynthia?" he began.
"No."
"Yet Whitsuntide is very close. Perhaps you have thought better of it?"
"No."
Mr. Benoliel looked at her as she stood, aggressively showing him her back, and smiled at her, with some amusement, a great deal of affection, and a little pity.
"Of course," he said, "I have not much right to interfere, and yet I should like you to hear, Cynthia, what I have to say. Otherwise I shall fail your father."
Cynthia turned about at once, and her manner toward him changed with her movement. The appeal of his voice and words had its effect upon her, and not that alone. Mr. Benoliel was so neat and supple, he sat with so upright a figure in his chair, his hair was so black and sleek and thick that she was seldom really conscious of his age. But at times, as now, when by chance she looked straight into his eyes and noticed their fatigue and their patience, and how the light had quite gone out of them, it came upon her almost as a shock that this was an old, old man; and because she was surprised she exaggerated his age, and gave to him in return for his pity the cruel pity of youth. She was in the mood almost to admit his right to interfere. But her gift of silence and the weariness which had become instinctive checked her. She moved forward to him with a gracious deference--that was all--and said, standing in front of him:
"I am glad of course to hear anything you have to say, Mr. Benoliel. You disapprove of my marriage."
"Yes."
"Yet you wanted me married."
"To the right person."
"Lord Helmsdale," said Cynthia, with a little pout of disdain.
"Youth should marry youth," returned Mr. Benoliel.
He looked the girl over from head to foot. She stood in front of him in her delicate frock of soft white satin and lace, long-limbed and slender, with the gloss of youth upon the heavy curls of her fair hair, and the rose of youth on her cheeks, and the sheen of youth upon her white and pretty shoulders. She was the color of a flower, and had the freshness of a flower upon a morning of dew. From the tip of her slim satin slipper to the ribbon in her hair, she was dressed with a daintiness which set her beauty proudly off. To Mr. Benoliel she was radiant and wonderful with youth.
"Yes," he repeated, "youth should marry youth, Cynthia, especially when it is such rare youth as yours."
Cynthia was pleased. She knew a compliment when she heard it.
"You have shifted your ground, Mr. Benoliel," she said, smiling down at him.
"No," he answered.
"It was social position, which you wanted me to marry in Lord Helmsdale."
"That, too. Yes. I don't make light of it. I am old enough not to blow a trumpet round the walls of Jericho in these days," he said. "But I did not tell you all my thought. I am an old man, and there are certain things I am shy of talking about. I am like you in that, Cynthia, eh? We neither of us wear our hearts upon our sleeves or are fond of talking sentiment. But I am compelled to to-night. I think the most beautiful thing in the world is a couple of young lovers facing all the unknown future, hand in hand, high of hope and courage, and serious with the uplifting seriousness of love. Now you are not in love, Cynthia, and he's not young. So, from my point of view, on both sides this marriage falls short of the marriage which should be."
"Captain Rames is not old," replied Cynthia. She omitted all reference to the point in which she herself failed according to Benoliel's standard. Isaac Benoliel noticed her admission, and, though he made no comment, he became still more determined to prevent the marriage if by any means he could. He had drawn his bow at a venture. With that touch of charlatanism which made him delight in posing as omniscient, he had stated as a fact what he only suspected. But she would have denied the suggestion, and indignantly, had it been false. He was sure now that she did not care for Harry Rames as a young woman should care for the man she is to marry. Moreover there had been a note of involuntary regret in Cynthia's voice as she had answered him. It seemed that she too agreed with him as to what should have been, and grieved that it was not to be.
"No," he conceded, "Captain Rames is not old. But neither is he young. He is forty, or thereabouts. He has lived by eighteen years longer than you have. And so--I will tell you the truth, Cynthia"--and he leaned forward with his hands upon his knees and his eyes shrewdly watching her face--"and so I am afraid. Yes, I look forward into your future, and I am afraid."
He saw Cynthia wince. So often had she spoken just such words to herself. Ever since she had crouched by the door in the dark room at the estancia, fear had walked at her heels with its shadow thrown upon the road beyond her feet. Was it to lie in front of her all her life? Here was her chosen adviser thinking her thoughts. She was not to be comforted by Sir James Burrell's reasonings. Mr. Benoliel might be altogether compact of the Orient. None the less his words knocked shrewdly at her heart. She sank down at the end of a sofa close at Mr. Benoliel's side, her face all troubled and discouraged.
"But I accepted Harry so that I might be safe," she cried tremulously, "so that I might no longer be afraid," and then sat with her cheeks afire, conscious that she had betrayed herself.
"I mean--" she corrected herself hastily.
"Just what you said, Cynthia," rejoined Mr. Benoliel. Once more he had shot his arrow at a venture and reached the mark. He had now for the first time the key to her. Much was explained to him. But he spoke as though the explanation had long been known to him.
"Yes, ever since I have known you, you have lived in fear, Cynthia," he said.
Cynthia did not again deny the truth. She found a better argument in the recollection of old Mr. Daventry's death-bed.
"But there was no reason for the fear," she cried. "It was groundless. I tortured myself for nothing. It was all due to a foolish mistake." She hesitated, choosing her words so that they might carry some sort of conviction and yet reveal nothing. "The mistake arose because--people--were silent--and they were silent because they wished to spare, and thought that knowledge would hurt. It was the silence which hurt."
"This time," said Mr. Benoliel, "silence shall not do harm. Nor shall a thought to spare. I will be frank with you as to why I am afraid, if you will listen to me. I shall have to tell you a little about myself. I shall not spare myself."
He spoke with reluctance. For he was reticent about himself. Cynthia realized suddenly how very little she knew of him, though she probably knew him more intimately than any one else, except the separated wife in Eaton Square. He had kept his secrets better than she had kept hers. Now he was going to reveal himself, and certainly to open old wounds for her sake.
"Thank you," she said gently. "I shall know of what you are afraid, of something perhaps which I may now be able to avert. But I ought to tell you at once, that nothing which you say can change me."
Mr. Benoliel, however, persisted.
"I daren't be silent, Cynthia. There are just three great crises--some would say three great catastrophes--birth, marriage, and death. The first and the last happen. They are outside our control. But about the middle one we do ourselves have a word to say; we can direct it. And it's the most important of them all. For it means the beginning of life for others, and the making or undoing of our own. Therefore you can't afford to trust to luck, Cynthia."
"I am not trusting to luck at all," said Cynthia confidently.
"Aren't you?" asked Mr. Benoliel. "You are proposing to marry a man, nineteen years of whose life--whose man's life--if you understand me, you have had no share in, no influence upon, and have now no real knowledge of. I am not suggesting that the conventional other woman is somewhere in the background, waiting to appear at the marriage ceremony with a baby in her arms," he continued with a smile. "But during those nineteen years how many things must have happened to him, trials and miseries and elations, to modify and mould his character? And since you are ignorant of the things which happened to him, how can you know the man?"
"Yet I think I do know him," said Cynthia, and her confidence increased. She could meet Mr. Benoliel on this battle-ground. "And without laying claim of any particular insight. For he has always been careful that I should know him. From the very first day of our acquaintanceship he has spoken and acted quite deliberately in order that I might have no illusions about him. He has wanted me to know him just as clearly as he knows himself."
Mr. Benoliel shrugged his shoulders.
"Does he know himself?" he asked.
"Better than most men," said Cynthia. "He has set out to use himself as a machine and he has studied the machine unceasingly, its limits and its capacities, so that he might use it to its fullest power." She recalled Harry Rames's foresight, the careful laying of his plans, the queer modesty which underlay his ambition to excel. She turned triumphantly to Mr. Benoliel. "Oh, yes, he knows himself a good deal better than youth can know itself."
"Ah!" said Mr. Benoliel, raising a warning finger. "I was waiting for that. I admit that youth doesn't know itself. But then it's not so important that it should. There's not, after all, as yet, so very much to know. But take it this way. Suppose that you and Captain Rames were both young and of an age! Suppose that he had the nineteen years which separate you in front of him instead of behind him!"
"Well?" said Cynthia.
"Why, then, when he reached forty, you, the wife, would know him better than he would know himself. A wife always does, if she lives in sympathy with her husband. I am presuming that. You would know him a good deal better than he knows himself now. The solitary nineteen years, of which now I dread the consequences, you would have shared. That's the point. And you wouldn't be running the danger you are running now."
"What danger?" asked Cynthia impatiently. "Of what are you afraid?"
"I am afraid of the latent things," Mr. Benoliel answered. "I am afraid of the seeds which may have been sown in him during these nineteen years, and of which the plant has not yet shown. I am afraid of latent desires, fancies, ambitions, latent cravings of which he is not yet aware, and which may some day come to life with overwhelming strength. Haven't you seen men suddenly change for no apparent reason to the ordinary observer, drop from all their established habits, begin again upon another plane? I have, and that's the change I am afraid of now. For it's one you would be powerless to avert, since you would not even suspect it until it had actually begun."
He turned toward Cynthia, and with a smile upon his face summed up his argument.
"Make no mistake, Cynthia. I am not making light of Captain Rames. In a way my fears are an actual tribute to the man. But I am afraid that out of a life so busy, and so keen as his has been, so fraught with incidents, so varied, something may suddenly seize him and catch him back and hold him; some craving, some ambition in which you will have no share, and which will separate you forever."
He spoke with so much earnestness that Cynthia was impressed against her will. She was sure that he was speaking with knowledge of a kindred case. Certain words he had dropped made her certain that the kindred case was his own.
"But supposing that such a change came," she said with hesitation, "must it separate?"
"No," said Mr. Benoliel gently, "not if both bring to the marriage love. Then I don't think it need." He glanced at her swiftly, and said with a sudden sharp note in his voice: "But what if the marriage be only a bargain, Cynthia? What then?" and the blood rushed into the girl's face as he looked at her.
"I'll tell you," he cried. His voice rose and a kind of sombre passion rang in it. "One party doesn't keep the bargain, or keeps it half-heartedly, as an irksome thing, and day by day the separation grows more complete, until you are living with your enemy or living quite alone."
His voice dropped again to a whisper on the last words. He finished and sat lost wistfully in his own recollections, and forgetful of Cynthia at his side. After a little while his lips moved, and, as an old man will, he spoke a word or two to himself. Cynthia's ears caught the words.
"It was my fault, and it couldn't be helped," he said, and so again fell into a long silence, with his eyes upon the coals of the fire. At length Cynthia touched him gently upon the sleeve.
"I should like--the instance," she said timidly.
Isaac Benoliel roused himself with a start.
"Yes. I mean to give it you."
"But I have no right to it," Cynthia insisted. "You must remember that."
Benoliel shook his head and smiled.
"You are a young girl starting out on life. You have every right to it, Cynthia."
"I mean that it cannot change me," she said. "I would like to hear it--yes. But it is only that I may understand and be ready. And if you think that reason insufficient, don't tell me. I shall thank you, all the same, for offering to tell me."
"You mustn't take the warning literally," he said. "I am of the East, you know. So is my story"; and a sudden relief swept over Cynthia. He was not of her people, his stand-point would not be hers, his warning might not apply to her. She thought of Sir James Burrell's words. Discouragement sat more lightly upon her than it had done during the last hour. There were certain curious phases in Mr. Benoliel's life which were not understood--sudden disappearances, for instance, during which no one met him to bring back to London the place of his abode. He was recognized as a man apart. Yes, he was of the Orient, and he might have no message for her ears.
"It was my race which caught me back," Benoliel began, and Cynthia's courage increased. But his story was only just begun.